On Saturday, Tony called his aunt Cassandra, who works for the Duchess of Bedford. Despite the short notice, Aunt Sandra graciously welcomed us to her apartment at Woburn Abbey (check it out: http://www.woburnabbey.co.uk/) and obtained entrance passes with audio tours for us.
Aunt Sandra pointed out the beautiful, but very normal-looking, lawn that leads to the entrance. It's sacred space, because when Henry VIII destroyed the religious houses of England after his divorce from Catharine of Aragon, Woburn Abbey was among the targets of Henry's greed. The Abbot resisted the dissolution of his house, and as a punishment the King's men hung him from a nearby tree. His monks buried him under that tree, hence the nature of the lawn, even today.
That was spooky. The house, though, is really spectacular.
Example? Even a person who doesn't know a thing about British history might notice, wandering in the long gallery toward the end of the tour, a portrait hanging on the left. It shows a redheaded woman wearing an elaborately embroidered and pearl-encrusted dress, a huge white ruff, with a fleet of ships visible through the window on her right. Who is this? Only Queen Elizabeth I. It's the Armada portrait, probably the most famous painting of this most famous queen.
But the house isn't intimidating, despite a portrait of 'Bloody' Mary staring down at you with that nasty, pinched expression. For one thing, it is both gorgeous and very human. Woburn Abbey feels like a home. The pink plastic toddler truck on the lawn helps with that (there's a John Deere one, too), as do the two dogs laying around in the sun. But the real reason is because the house is a sweet mixture of historical/elegant/priceless and family.
So here you'll find a hallway lined with portraits, including a very sad family painting. In 1683, Lord William Russell supported the Rye House plot against James II. For this crime, he was beheaded. His father, the Earl of Bedford, supported William and Mary, so when they replaced James II on the throne they rewarded the father with a dukedom. But the Russells preserved the memory of Lord John Russell with a beautiful portrait of his wife and four children. The saddest part is that the oldest son, shown as a toddler in the portrait, would go on to gamble away almost all of the Bedford fortune, when he became the 2nd Duke. He died young ('fortunately' the narrator says), and his brother, the 3rd Duke, had to try to re-build the family.
In the same hallway, a long case exemplifies the balance between family and history. Alongside tiny dolls (and their even tinier tortoiseshell combs) played with by Russell daughters sits Queen Victoria's riding crop, tipped in gold with inlaid rubies.
Likewise, the other rooms are filled with lovely antiques, such as hand-painted 17th century Chinese wallpaper. But here and there are photographs of the last Duke (who died unexpectedly of a stroke) and the current Duke and his wife. A full-length portrait shows 'Naughty Georgie', the daughter of the 4th Duke of Gordon and second wife of the 6th Duke. She was a bad, bad girl, apparently. There's an entire room dedicated to the 'Flying Duchess' (Mary, the 11th Duchess) who took up airplanes as a hobby (at age 61, after nursing wounded men during World War I) and enjoyed them very much. She disappeared in her Gipsy Moth in 1937.
In some ways, the house is like anyone's home. The family has an interest in horse racing. Any house might contain memorabilia, pictures, or mementos from a hobby. In this house, those mementos are oil paintings of their champions, crystal and silver trophies from the Derby. In the video that begins the tour, the present Duchess wheels her baby daughter down a magnificent hallway in...a regular old stroller. And on the stairs going down to the Vaults, there's some not-very-interesting pottery and whatnot jammed into a glass cabinet. It's nice to know that even the Duke of Bedford has trouble letting go.
So on the one hand, the house is stunning. The ceilings drip with elaborate plasterwork, the rooms nearly burst with portraits of beautiful, eccentric, and important Britons, and the views onto the park and lake cannot be beaten. On the other hand, you can easily imagine people walking through the halls, sleeping in the beds, and eating in the dining room(s). Do I have a stone vault filled with silver (and a separate one for gold) (and yet another one for porcelain, which supposedly has a ghost)? Well, no. Do I have an entire semi-basement room built entirely of seashells, ca. 1660? Uh...no.
Maybe in our next house.
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